Obama should show Karzai that ‘superpowers don’t bluff’

Afghan President Hamid Karzai looks on during a joint news conference with British Prime Minister David Cameron at the Presidential Palace in Kabul June 29, 2013.

July 10, 2013 5:48 pmUpdated: July 10, 2013 5:49 pm

In November 1963, when South Vietnam’s first president, Ngo Dinh Diem, was going off the reservation and alienating his U.S. patrons, a group of South Vietnamese generals helpfully staged a coup and assassinated him.

Fast-forward a half-century to Afghanistan, where members of President Barack Obama’s administration can (thankfully) only splutter, sotto voce, to the New York Times that frustrations with President Hamid Karzai’s government are driving the United States to consider speeding up the complete withdrawal of troops — a “so-called” zero option.

Let’s face it: A pullout of all U.S. troops from Afghanistan by the end of 2014 is undesirable. Current plans to keep 8,000 to 12,000 mostly U.S. troops in Afghanistan to train and support Afghan troops, and an unspecified number in a counterterrorist role, will make it easier to advance the one abiding U.S. interest: to prevent the use of Afghanistan as a base for terrorist attacks against the U.S. and its allies.

Obama’s threat, however, also provides an opportunity to inject some much-needed realism into discussions of Afghanistan’s future. Consider the status quo: Next fiscal year, the U.S. and its allies will provide more than $10 billion in aid to Afghanistan, including $7.7 billion for the Afghan National Security Forces. Afghanistan won’t be able to support this planned force of 352,000 on its own for years, if not decades — its total government revenue in 2011 was less than $2 billion.

The best way to reduce the crippling long-term burden of an outsize military on Afghanistan is to encourage a political settlement between the Afghan government and its enemies. Yet U.S. efforts to do that by reaching out to the Taliban are what led to the current, and particularly intense, impasse in U.S.-Afghan relations. Fearing that the U.S. was working to conclude a separate peace, Karzai repudiated its overtures to the Taliban and ended talks on a deal to keep U.S. troops in Afghanistan after 2014.

Meanwhile, the Afghan government under Karzai is sinking deeper into a morass of corruption and waste. The U.S. Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction has identified myriad ways in which the Afghan government is misappropriating or exploiting U.S. assistance — for instance, almost $1 billion in penalties and taxes on aid contractors. Is this really the kind of government that the U.S. wants, or can afford, to provide billions of dollars in support?

The administration may have to show that the U.S. is willing to abandon the village in order to save it.